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What is vegetable stock made of? The answer, for most of us, is a cube, or perhaps a tub of granules or a pod of concentrate, ready to give backbone to the flavour of a vegetable soup or a meat-free casserole.

We’d hope these short cuts were more or less the equivalent of home-made. So if beef stock is made chiefly of simmered beef bones, and chicken of chicken bones, you might well expect the vegetable version to be made of vegetables – albeit contained in a handy water-soluble form.

In fact, most vegetable stocks pay the merest nod to plant life, with as little as six per cent veg listed on the wrapper. The rest is a pick-and-mix of palm oil, hydrolysed vegetable protein, glucose syrup, maltodextrin...